


Communion

by jekyll_inside



Series: Toads and Birds [2]
Category: Les Misérables - All Media Types
Genre: Café Musain, Canon Era, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-18
Updated: 2015-07-18
Packaged: 2018-04-10 00:46:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,431
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4370807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/jekyll_inside/pseuds/jekyll_inside
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>'Marius was a young man that needed others to care for – it was the source of his strength, often the only thing that would push him to ferocity – and ever since this fabled Cosette had first been mentioned (tentative at first, with a colour on his cheeks), he had been seen to settle, to ground himself as a man with a future and a cause.</p>
<p>It pleased Grantaire, even if he'd wished it for Eponine.</p>
<p>It annoyed Enjolras terribly.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Communion

**Author's Note:**

> So, second canon-verse upload. Hope you like it guys - there's a little french but nothing huge, translations in the end notes if you'd like them :)

“Well,” said Marius, and his gentle eyes were downcast, bashful. “I feel as though I could do anything at all.”

Bahorel laughed uproariously, for he could not empathise with the feeling that seemed to have turned their friend's heart so, having never felt it himself, and a few others of their number mocked him good-naturedly as well. But really they were glad. Marius was a young man that needed others to care for – it was the source of his strength, often the only thing that would push him to ferocity – and ever since this fabled Cosette had first been mentioned (tentative at first, with a colour on his cheeks), he had been seen to settle, to ground himself as a man with a future and a cause.

It pleased Grantaire, even if he'd wished it for Eponine.

It annoyed Enjolras terribly.

“Now that you feel so empowered, Marius,” their leader said, gripping the edge of the table he leant over, “perhaps you will lend yourself to the problem at hand.”

Marius flushed, as he was unfortunately prone to doing. “Of course.” He put down his untouched wine and wiped his hands on his trousers as though he were a mason returning from an undeserved break.

“Oh leave him, Apollo,” Grantaire murmured from the corner he occupied, the glass companion in this hand giving him reason to smile. “He is only in love, and made foolish with it – is he not allowed?”

“I have no room for fools,” Enjolras returned readily, and his eyes, Grantaire thought, were a Parisian summer. “And I question your love of this cause, Marius, if it can be so out-shone by that which you feel for a woman. We have neither the luxury of time nor men. To lose either over chance encounters and superficial impressions is a detriment to us all.”

“He is harmless,” Grantaire returned, for he had a habit of being foolish in the face of danger if that danger bought him another moment's glance. “What's more, he raises our spirits in talking of his love. Perhaps there is a vicarious joy in hearing of these ' _rencontres fortuites_ ', as you put them?”

“ _Messieurs_ , perhaps it is a question of timing.” Combeferre had crossed his arms over his chest, and although he was lean, the gesture was effective. “It will be good to hear of a friend's fortune when the fortune of France is less threatened, no?”

Grantaire grinned, for he often found some humour in the man's exasperated mediation.

“Combeferre is right, Marius,” he murmured, casting a conspiring glance at his friend across the table. “Let us hear of it tomorrow, when this revolution business is done.”

“If you have so little faith, Grantaire,” Enjolras said, “as to say we will not last a day, then I wonder why it is that you bother gracing us with your presence? Your time, I'm sure, is precious.”

“ _Au contraire_ , dear leader, perhaps it is my great faith in your efficiency that allows me to say such a thing. I believe you could topple them all before midnight, particularly if we do not indulge in emotions along the way.”

“Enough, Grantaire, if you please.” There was little humour in Combeferre now. Grantaire conceded the round, complimenting the man with a raise of his bottle before bringing it to his lips and falling silent. Enjolras scowled impressively at him, the scorn etched across the sweeps and bones of his face in a way that Grantaire drank in more greedily than wine. The taste, however, was bitter.

Beside Grantaire sat Courfeyrac – he often chose this spot as if to bridge the gap between believer and non – and he leaned forward now to talk below their leader's continuing words.

“There are other ways to defend a man, my friend, that are not so self-sacrificing.”

Grantaire turned his head to him, although unwilling and unable to take his eyes of Enjolras as he replied quietly: “Ah, but where is the fun in that?”

“It is not enjoyment that I see on your face.”

He smiled despite the small fear that moved in his chest. “Oh?”

Courfeyrac's mouth twisted as though he could see Grantaire very plainly behind the deflections, and while disconcerting, it did make Grantaire wonder at him. The best understanding, after all, came from shared experience.

“You enjoy your metaphors, Grantaire,” the man murmured eventually, and his hazel eyes were gently earnest. “You are like parchment to a flame.”

“Careless? A waste of fine material?” he replied lightly.

“No my friend, you burn brightest in your own destruction.”

Grantaire scoffed. “ _Un peu m_ _é_ _lodramatique, Courfeyrac_ _._ ”

“ _Mais c'est vrai.”_

They broke away from each other for a while , Courfeyrac leaning back once more and Grantaire left to listen to Enjolras. His companion's notion stayed with him, as being both an artist and a drunkard left him doubly susceptible to the romance of such things, and he looked for the flames in their leader as he talked. He found them of course, because Enjolras was nothing if not fiery, and Grantaire's hands itched to draw them out (indeed, he was not immune to the irony of lacking parchment). He saw the colour in Enjolras' cheeks, the sparking gold of his hair – perhaps he would burn his hands if they ran through it - his very stature, with the strong, slim lines of red and black that stirred something carnal in him – all of it spoke of that element. Perhaps Courfeyrac's choice had been very deliberate.

“I find it impossible to believe the people do not stand with us.” Enjolras' boots, brown, clean leather, creaked the floorboards as he paced a small circle. “The only explanation I can offer is ignorance to our cause,” he said. “Why else would a man refuse the freedom to work an honest trade? Or a woman, the money to feed her children? There is nothing for them in this broken country of ours. How they can be satisfied, how they can say that one king for another is a just bargain, I do not know. Do they see liberals in these Orleanists? Only a fool would do so. Only a fool would be lead by their bourgeois doctrine and believe it not kin and kind with that of the cousin so recently ousted. The people do not go blind in two summers. I refuse to believe it.”

“And yet the streets are quiet, Enjolras,” Jean Prouvaire said from where he stood with Joly, Bossuet at his shoulder against the wall. “I walk out there now and hear nothing of the talk we're used to. I would not say there is contentment, Paris is too sick for that, but perhaps they lack the spirit for another fight. _Le chol_ _é_ _ra_ , after all...”

They did not need reminding of it – there were some streets that were now impassable, and in the spring rains the water in the gutters had turned milky and lethal with the waste. For a while they had not known if young Gavroche's eyes had sunken from the sickness or simply hunger, and it was the thought of him now that brought Grantaire from his silence.

“They do not lack spirit,” he said, in a voice without its usual mirth. “When you are hungry you become more desperate – it is not in the Parisian's nature to lie down and die. We have fight in us.”

Enjolras laughed sharply, and it was a terrible sound. “ _Nous avons_ , you say? You include yourself in their number?” he said, stopping his pacing. “You speak as though you are one of them, but you have no faith in their potential – you have made that clear to us before.”

“I am more one of them than you, Apollo.”

“Oh? Because you too lack potential?”

He had not been ready for the barb so he felt it sorely, and his cynic's smirk was soon pulled down like a visor across his face. “Perhaps,” he murmured. “But I was more referring to a flaw in your approach. The people you speak of are an abstract ideal, a vehicle for change and for your cause. You cannot judge the moods of an ideal, the hopes and fears of a vehicle. _Parisien_ , to you, means _une camarade_. To me, a Parisian is simply a man unlucky enough to have been born in our city's _quartiers_. 'The People', and I hear in your voice Plato's capitalisation of the word, refers only to a population in my eyes. I do not believe in the people as you see them, for I believe in the men and women on our streets and in our houses. I am one of them. In the same way, I do not believe in the Patria you fight for, but I believe in you.” He looked at him with alarming clarity. “You follow my meaning, I think.”

“It is not a difficult message to grasp,” he returned, something complex – intrigue, irritation at the bold declaration – colouring his face and making him glance at Courfeyrac for a moment, as he often did when he felt something unwarranted. “Go on, then, if you believe yourself such a 'man of the people'. What do you suggest is the problem?”

Grantaire smiled at the small acknowledgement despite himself. “They lack direction,” he said, “not passion. I know a girl – Eponine, Marius – and she knows in turn the mood of the masses. She is poor, and therefore well acquainted with the suffering you preach against.”

Enjolras did not appreciate the pointed look that Grantaire was bold enough to give him. He did not know poverty, no, but he did not think the drunkard a worthy judge of his morality.

“What does a woman that you happen to fraternise with know of politics?” he replied, and Grantaire could not help think the squaring of his shoulders quite lovely. “Are you suggesting we follow her whims and feelings simply because she knows the life of a victim? She is not alone, Grantaire, and we cannot listen to each sufferer as though their experience makes their judgement gospel.”

“Grantaire does not mean that.” It was Marius, returning the defence his friend had given him. “Eponine Thernadier does not instruct us as to how to go about our business. She is Gavroche's older sister, you know of her I think.”

Enjolras shed a fraction's tension – the Thernadier children were comrades, even if the oldest was a stranger, and the removal of Grantaire's antagonistic tone allowed him a little patience. “Oh?”

“Grantaire is not wrong in what he says,” Marius continued, and Grantaire noted the careful absence of the word 'correct'. “She is connected through the work of her father to the city's underbelly, and she is perhaps able to test waters we cannot reach. If Grantaire relays he perception of the people's mood, we would be wise to note it. He is...” A wary glance at the smirking cynic, “correct, after all, in saying we are distanced from those we fight for. That is not to say we are unjust in doing as we do,” he added, at a slight flare in Enjolras' expression, “merely that it is necessary to ground ourselves in the reality we are trying to repair.”

“It _is_ important to remember the civilisation in our cause,” Combeferre conceded at Enjolras' side. “We deal with lives, not mere concepts, after all.”

“That is what I said,” Grantaire pointed out, and it won him a moment's relief in the glare he received, making him smile at Enjolras with contrasting affection simply to rile him further. “But perhaps Combeferre's deeper voice makes the words more palatable.”

“When Combeferre speaks he does so in order to aid us,” Enjolras snapped, “not to cut us down at every turn.”

“And yet we have reached the conclusion I made myself,” Grantaire parried, “only after extensive deliberation. Perhaps I am not such an enemy after all, dear leader?”

“I have had enough of you,” he muttered, and he turned to Combeferre even as the words made Grantaire's spirit rear its head. _I will never have enough of you_ , it said.

“We need to organise, then, in a way we have not before,” Enjolras continued lowly. “We need to spread word in a way we have not yet done.”

“We must be careful,” Courfeyrac said from the other side of the table, and Grantaire found himself avoiding his eyes now. “With Lemarque so stricken by the cholera our opposition is already at arms. They are wary of an uprising, should he die.”

“The people aren't the only ones to remember revolutions past,” Bahorel agreed from the corner near Grantaire. “The army, too, will recall it.”

“I have faith,” Enjolras said, with a set of his jaw and a flame in his blue eyes that could inspire them all. “If we are united they need not fear, but united we must be. Courfeyrac, Joly, Bossuet, Jehan, you are all men of different circles. Talk to your friends, even if it is not above a murmur. We must rekindle – no, encourage – the passion they feel to fight. Combeferre-” he turned to him excitedly, and Grantaire ached for that attention like a forgotten wound. “We must begin planning the inevitable confrontation. Logistics, arms, all of it. Once made we cannot allow the people's enthusiasm to go stale.”

“And the rest of us?” Bahorel asked, upstanding with Marius and the others as the chatter began to rise. “What can we do?”

Enjolras touched his mouth in thought for a moment – Grantaire would paint the gesture later – then beckoned them to join him with the words: “We will think and allocate, friends. Come, join me here.” And they moved with the scraping of chairs and new vigour to be at his side. Grantaire could not blame them, but he himself did not budge. He knew the words were not for him. He watched for a while as his companions crowded round the table, sets of eager eyes meeting those of their leader. _How strange it must be_ , he thought, _to see him only as that._ To not imagine falling to their knees before him with a quickening heart, but merely to nod and suggest and argue and follow. They were enthralled, yes, but not enraptured. Energised, but not enchanted. They did not wonder, at night, at the existence of angels, and see Enjolras behind closed lids.

Grantaire smiled to himself and knew that, even though it would go unnoticed, he would be the last to leave the Musain tonight. Or perhaps, he thought, he would be asleep before long.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading guys :D check out the other one-shot in this series if you liked it.  
> I see you, fellow canon dorks - drop me a comment. ^-^
> 
> translations:  
> rencontres fortuites - chance encounters  
> messieurs - gentlemen  
> au contraire - on the contrary  
> un peu mélodramatique, Courfeyrac - that's a little melodramatic, Courfeyrac  
> mais c'est vrai - but it's true  
> le choléra - the cholera  
> nous avons - we have  
> parisien - a Parisian  
> une camarade - a comrade  
> quartiers - the geographical divisions of the city


End file.
